Hands On With Tafiti: Same Live Search, New Pretty Face

Microsoft's new search engine, Tafiti, is gorgeous. Make no mistake--it's beautifully designed and has a lot of features, and it's built on top of Microsoft's new Silverlight platform (the one that Microsoft wants to displace Adobe Flash with as...

Microsoft's new search engine, Tafiti, is gorgeous. Make no mistake--it's beautifully designed and has a lot of features, and it's built on top of Microsoft's new Silverlight platform (the one that Microsoft wants to displace Adobe Flash with as multimedia king of the Web). But the problems with Tafiti are the same things that make it so attractive and fun to play with: It's a great technical demo for the power of Silverlight and its use as a multimedia app, but I can't see Tafiti as a serious contender in the search wars.

Before you give Tafiti a try, you'll have to install Microsoft's Silverlight platform. It only works in Windows and MacOS, so Linux users are out of luck. The installer is small and takes only a moment to download, but don't be fooled when it tells you to restart your computer: It's a browser plug-in, so you can get away with restarting just your browser. I tried Tafiti in both Firefox and Internet Explorer and didn't notice any feature differences, although it seems to run a bit faster in IE than in Firefox (no surprise there).

Microsoft says that Tafiti (which means "do research" in Swahili) is designed to help people who need to perform multiple searches and a great deal of Web research to visualize their searches, save information relevant to their searches for future use, and share information with others. This makes sense; how many times have you done a number of Web searches only to lose track of the first set of links that you clicked on? Other search engines resolved this problem by keeping search histories that you can browse, but Tafiti gives you the Shelf, which is a translucent toolbar on the side of the page where you can drag search results for review later or to save.

When you visit Tafiti, you'll be greeted by a blank page with a piece of scrap paper in the center where you type your search term. When you search for something, the site springs to life, the term moves off to the side, and the results are displayed in the center. The circular wheel on the left side of the page will toggle between Web page results, image results, RSS feeds, news, and even books. Tafiti is powered by Windows Live Search, which by itself could be a deal breaker if you don't find Microsoft's search results as relevant as those of other engines. I found the search results to be OK, not great, and the image results about the same quality as Live Search, so there was nothing new on that front.

What startled me was Tafiti's Tree View. Click on the tree icon at the top of your search results, and the display changes to a tree based on your search term. Each branch grows from the trunk and ends in a search result. It's pretty but not terribly useful, and when using it, my browser's memory utilization shot up significantly. Even so, I thought the tree view was cool and original.

As original and attractive as it may be, there are some significant problems with Tafiti. First of all, I'm not sure many people search the Web for the aesthetic experience. If more were truly better, Google would have sunk under flashier competitors long ago. People use search engines search, peruse results, and find relevant links. Most of us don't have the time or patience to hover over an icon of a photograph for a few seconds and wait for the tooltip to appear telling us to click for image search results. In general, when searching the Web for information, we want fast, simple, and effective--and unfortunately, Tafiti is slow, complicated, and the results are lacking.

Similarly, I can't imagine anyone who would want to install a plug-in to use a search engine. When I was reading other people's experiences with Tafiti, several conversations morphed into troubleshooting Silverlight installs and what browsers Tafiti supported and which ones it didn't work with. If your search engine requires technical support and troubleshooting, you have a problem.

I'm being hard on Tafiti, but Microsoft has a habit of putting a pretty face on its search engines rather than improving the relevancy of their results. I think we all remember Ms. Dewey, don't we? She was another flashy and overblown cover for Microsoft's Live Search, and although she got a ton of publicity, Windows Live Search still lags behind its rivals in popularity and search-result relevancy. I do think Tafiti has some useful features, but it's bloated and kind of clunky. I wish the search team at Microsoft would put as much effort into improving the speed and quality of Live Search as the Silverlight team put into Tafiti.

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